VILNIUS - The six-month political saga that led to the impeachment and removal of former President Rolandas Paksas led to disturbing human rights violations in Lithuania, according to a report issued by a watchdog rights group.
The document, compiled by the George Soros-funded Human Rights Monitoring Institute, alleges that both the abuses perpetrated by Paksas and his advisers while in office and the tactics employed by the government employees charged with investigating the Presidential Palace revealed a troubling pattern of rights abuse in the country, especially those related to personal privacy.
"I'm not sure that even right now someone isn't listening to us," Henrikas Mickevicius, executive director of the institute, said during an interview with The Baltic Times.
"The biggest danger is that violations of rights were sustained at the highest level of government. Paksas was collecting information on at least 44 private individuals - against the law," said Mickevicius. "I think what the scandal highlighted was that when this happens at a high level, the practice spreads downward, and it's only a matter of time before it's in the whole system."
As intrusive as Paksas' intelligence gathering may have been, government officials investigating his abuses actually propagated a climate of unnecessary surveillance, the authors claim.
Saying that the right to privacy "is not fully understood," the report alleges that "wiretapping private telephone conversations seemingly turned into a routine practice, especially since the activities of the intelligence community are insufficiently supervised or held accountable."
Tapped conversations between Paksas and Yuri Borisov, his controversial chief campaign contributor, were broadcast on television news reports and printed in newspapers at the height of the scandal.
Intelligence officials, however, have emphasized their strict compliance with Lithuanian laws governing information gathering, which include securing a signed order from both a judge and a prosecutor before initiating secret surveillance.
"Our officers cannot begin surveillance without these documents. Plus, we have an internal security system to ensure compliance with the laws," said Vytautas Makauskas, press representative for the State Security Department, Lithuania's primary domestic intelligence agency.
"It's just not possible to simply begin tapping someone's phone conversations or spying on them with no reason. We have also been very active in discussions in the Seimas (Lithuania's parliament) regarding changes in the law to best guard people from unnecessary intrusions," said Makauskas.
A third institution implicated in privacy issues by the report is the media.
While the authors admit that the degree of openness in public life matches that of any European nation, they claim that journalists themselves used little discretion in disseminating the information to which they have special access.
"The media have to be neutral. But it's difficult to see in the Lithuanian media what is news and what is opinion. Ethical standards are very low, and what standards do exist have no way of being implemented," said Mickevicius.
While covering the scandal, journalists employed by news organizations - both pro- and anti-Paksas bias - employed tactics that differed very little from those used by the State Security Department, such as hidden cameras and microphones. Moreover, confidential information gathered in the course of investigations was routinely leaked to the media, which repeatedly broadcast details from top-secret files.
Surprisingly, even representatives of the journalistic community agree with the report's conclusions.
Dainius Radzevicius, chairman of the Lithuanian Journalists Union, said that the unrestrained behavior in the media stems from an absence of qualified professionalism.
"The problem is that while we do have standards of what is professional and what isn't professional for a journalist, we have no stipulations of who is a journalist and who isn't, which means there's no way to hold 'journalists' accountable to these standards," said Radzevicius.
"It's as if the government set all sorts of requirements for judges, but didn't actually say who a judge really is," he explained.
While Lithuania may not uphold privacy rights to the extent that other European countries do, experts at the Human Rights Monitoring Institute-Lithuania's only domestic human rights watchdog-believe that raising the profile of these issues could help change the overall national climate.
"Education is absolutely necessary. Most people in Lithuania aren't even aware of their rights," said Mickevicius.
